THERE’S a small gang of backbenchers, of which I am one, who have become informal advisers on the environment to No 10. My main interest is the polar regions and oceans, and so I hastened down to the highly appropriate venue of the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes to support the PM when she announced our 25-year plan for the world’s environment last Thursday.

I was proud that she opened by quoting one of Brinkworth’s finest sons, Professor Sir Roger Scruton. “[Conservatives] accept that the most important thing we can do is to settle down, to make a home for ourselves and to pass that home to our children.”

That aim, of course, is at the very heart of all environmental conservation and policy.

Brexit enables us to preserve our own environment and homeland in a way that we choose rather than faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. It will make farming at the forefront of the conservation of our countryside – as Michael Gove said in his Oxford University speech recently.

Brexit should be greatly beneficial to ordinary farmers, compensating them for the things which they do for the public good – environmental and habitat improvements, allowing access to the public and so on. What Michael Gove is proposing will perhaps be less welcome to those who earn vast subsidies from the CAP for no reason other than their own vast wealth enabling them to own a huge acreage.

I was especially pleased, in the aftermath of Sir David Attenborough’s wonderful Blue Planet 2, to hear the PM’s commitment to cleaning up our oceans, especially by moving further towards a non-recyclable-plastic-free world.

I have been asked by the Governor of the Falklands to take a small Parliamentary delegation to South Georgia with him, which of course I would be very keen to do. South Georgia is truly one of the last natural wildernesses on the globe, and thanks to it, Britain can boast one third of the world’s penguin population! It is also full of sea life of every kind, including blue whales.

I led a debate just before Christmas on preserving the seas around South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (especially the tooth fish which lives there), and would of course love to help raise the area’s profile further. I will keep you posted if the idea comes off.

Home, the hearth, the family. These are at the centre of our human happiness and contentment. And the preservation of our environment in every way must be the primary duty of every generation.

We must leave the planet in a better shape than we found it. I believe that Theresa May’s speech laid out many ways in which we can try to make sure that we do.